Tasty treats for Chinese New Year (2)

On the other hand, one can choose to dine at a decent Beijing-style restaurant on Lunar New Year's Eve or during the holiday.

Ji Family Banquet, a newly opened restaurant along the East Third Ring Road, offers a fusion of Chinese cuisine styles with an eye on health.

The owner claims to be the eighth generation of Ji Xiaolan, a renowned Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) scholar who has become even better known because of a popular TV drama about him in recent years.

The restaurant is decorated nicely in Suzhou garden style, with a pond and bridge at the entrance. The interior is elegant looking, with roofs decorated with gray tiles and wooden window panels.

The restaurant uses fresh river seafood from Jiangsu transported to Beijing on the same day. It promises to offer good-quality foodstuff at reasonable prices.

The foods are a fusion of Beijing, Huaiyang, Cantonese and Shandong cuisines.

Some new dishes worth trying are hairtail meatball, crispy sour-and-sweet "squirrel" fish, and brown-braised pork with hawthorn fruit to degrease it. A braised beef with cigu is also interesting. Cigu is arrowhead, a water plant, or Sagittaria sagittifolia. It has a soft and floury taste.

The restaurant is holding Chinese traditional medicine lectures for regular customers. It hopes to reflect a healthy belief in its cuisine.

Another refined Beijing-style eatery worth trying is Hua's Fine Dining Restaurant at Wangfujing. Built in courtyard style, the eatery is a refined version of the brand name's famous branch on Guijie food street.

When it was first established on Guijie, the restaurant made a fortune by offering spicy and tongue-numbing crayfish. But its Wangfujing branch has been upgraded into an eatery proffering a mixture of popular Beijing, Sichuan and Cantonese dishes.

When it comes to Beijing cuisine, Peking roast duck is a must. Hua's duck is roasted with fruit wood and tastes as good as any specialized roast duck restaurant in town. But the sauces it offers are different - a traditional brown sauce with a bit of mustard, a sour-and-spicy sauce, and a sour-and-sweet fruit jam.

The restaurant does not serve shallots with the duck because it can bring an odor to the mouth. Instead they present hawthorn fruit jelly, slices of pineapple and Hami melon and pancakes.

Seafood lovers can try the restaurant's flavorful "Buddha jumps over the wall" soup, which contains an array of seafood in chicken broth.

Also recommended are roast lamb ribs with crispy chilies, and Hua's family-style sweet-and-sour fried cabbage. Finish with traditional Beijing dim sum such as hawthorn, yellow pea and white bean cakes and "donkey roll over" yellow-rice cake.

The restaurant's private rooms have TV sets to watch CCTV's Spring Festival Eve gala show.